What skills do our personnel need?

Theming: making an out-of-the box Plone site look the way you want it to

To change the visual styling of your site, your staff will need to know or learn:

• XHTML: eXtensible HyperText Markup Language
• XML: eXtensible Markup Language
• CSS: Cascading Style Sheets
• Some Plone-specific technical expertise (e.g. TAL, METAL) and other web-related expertise (e.g. JavaScript) may also be required, depending on what you want to achieve.

WebLion can provide training and guidance in all these areas.

Products: customizing or making third-party products

If you want functionality that is not available out-of-the-box, or via an off-the-shelf add-on product, you can make it yourself. This is one of the beauties of Plone. WebLion can provide support and assistance. It is helpful to have:

• Some programming experience. Python experience would be excellent but is not essential.
• Willingness to undertake an "agile" or "iterative" approach to development. We recommend that you develop your product incrementally, testing and obtaining feedback at frequent intervals.

Server setup

WebLion Hosting takes all server setup off your plate. However, if you still want to use your own servers, you will need someone with system adminstration skills to:

• Set up the machines securely
• Set up authentication, e.g. against Penn State Access Account usernames and passwords
• Set up appropriate redirects to ensure a seamless transition from your old site to your new on
• Set up caching and other optimizations to make your site snappy

Training content providers; customizing workflows

The power of a content management system lies in letting lots of people add and edit content. You may need to:

• Train people how to use the interface
• Put in place quality control systems to ensure what they post is reasonable.

Anyone capable of using a word processor can learn how to update pages in Plone. However, you will almost certainly need to train your content providers on things such as:

• How to add or edit a page, an event, a news item, or whatever the person is contributing
• How to write for the web

This requires someone with good people and communication skills as well as a broad understanding of the user interface.

Analyzing user behavior

Are users finding it easy to use your site? What information is really important? What information is missing or hard to find? Can they do everything they want? Why might they come back?

Your site needs to serve its users well. How do you know if it does? We recommend two parallel approaches:

• Conduct qualitative usability tests with real users (not people who are overly informed). You don't need many. You can get profound insights from watching a handful of people navigate your site and listening to their reasons for clicking on the things they do. You can then go away, improve your site to fix the things that didn't work for them, and re-test.
• Use web analytics to examine (pseudo-quantitatively) the patterns of visits to your site, where visitors come from, what keywords they search for, and so on. No web analytics program will give you completely accurate information (whatever they claim), but you can still learn a lot about how people reach and move around your site.

Hence, you need:

• Someone with good communication and people skills (for the usability testing)
• Someone who can interpret analytical data